


Three Hops This Time: Everybody Clap Your Hands

by FrenchTwistResistance



Series: I’ve Always Been Crazy But It’s Kept Me from Going Insane [6]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, I just want caos to be a sitcom where hot middle-aged ladies kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22505809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Drunk Hilda makes some questionable decisions.
Relationships: Hilda Spellman/Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith
Series: I’ve Always Been Crazy But It’s Kept Me from Going Insane [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1597594
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Three Hops This Time: Everybody Clap Your Hands

They’re all pretty sloshy and sloppy by this hour.

Well not Sabrina. Hopefully not Sabrina, anyway. She’s at Roz’s, probably sober and probably asleep or at the very least trading giddy late-night secrets.

And that’s pretty much what they’re up to now, if any of them were to actually objectively describe what’s happening. The adult version of a silly slumber party.

They’ve been listening to old records and increasingly not paying attention to the jigsaw puzzle that had gathered them together in the parlor in the first place as they imbibe more and talk more freely.

Zelda’s got her empty bottle of whiskey (it had begun the evening barely twenty percent full) propped in the middle of her crossed legs as she sits on the floor, elbows on the coffee table, her double old-fashioned glass with the remains of four ice cubes and the dregs of her last bourbon and soda sweating into the loose hold of her interlaced fingers. Hilda and Ambrose are leaned against each other and also sitting on the floor but on the other side of the coffee table, sharing an afghan Hilda had crocheted years and years ago and passing their third shared bottle of Malbec between them. 

And they’re all laughing about the stupid ugly tie Edward had always worn as his good luck charm.

“Polka dots!” Hilda says between giggles.

“Fucking polka dots, I swear,” Zelda says, not exactly a giggle but not exactly not one.

“Say! Aunties! I’ve got just the thing tucked under my mattress...” Ambrose says suddenly and (a very valiant attempt at) soberly. The women both raise their eyebrows at that.

“A girly magazine?” Zelda says just as Hilda’s saying,

“Reefer?”

The sisters look at each other with suspicion and then laugh.

“No,” Ambrose says. “Better!”

Ambrose, in his hasty attempt to prove himself, gets briefly tangled like a wiley fish in a net and flops up, stumbles a few steps, and then bounds out of the room.

“What’s better than a nudey magazine or good hash?” Zelda says.

“Nothing,” Hilda says. “He’s probably overselling whatever it is.”

They laugh again and both attempt to take another drink and both find their respective vessels empty and both respectively frown. 

Zelda sets down her glass and then very carefully places her empty bottle next to it, precariously avoiding a pile of maybe picket-fence puzzle pieces and then stands. She straightens her skirt and crosses to the record player.

“What music do you think might be appropriate for whatever it is our nephew has in store for us?” Zelda says as she peruses the shelves now in front of her.

“Hmm,” Hilda says as she lies back onto the rug. “Well, knowing him—”

“‘Led Zeppelin IV,’” they both say in unison.

And just as Robert Plant is yelling the opening strains of Black Dog, Ambrose reappears holding a brown paper bag. He reaches into it and brandishes an ornate bottle.

Absinthe. 

Hilda knows she’s in trouble. If there’s one thing that does them all in it’s absinthe. They’re all very different people with very different goals and very different outlooks, but they all have the very same weakness for anything black licorice, especially if it gets them absolutely hammered. And especially especially if they’re halfway there already.

Zelda, still standing at the record player, throws her head back in a luxurious laugh and then exits swiftly. She re-enters a few seconds later with three tall, nondescript shot glasses. She lays them out on the table with the flourish of a blackjack dealer.

Ambrose pours from his bottle into Zelda’s shot glasses gleefully and generously, and they all knock them back.

“It’s been too long since we’ve done this, aunties,” Ambrose says.

“Too long, indeed. If I recall correctly, it’s been since the Nixon impeachment. Tricky Dick was certainly a dick,” Zelda says. She takes the bottle from him and pours. They drink again, and Hilda feels the room spinning.

Hilda looks over at Zelda, and it’s an impressionistic scene of red hair and white teeth. She looks the other way over at Ambrose, and it’s a cubist scene of brown jawline and bright blue silk pajamas. She blinks and shakes her head and can almost see clearly again.

“Speaking of,” Ambrose says. “Dicks that is.” He laughs. “Auntie H, what’s the deal with you and that hot teacher?”

Zelda’s laughing against the guitar riff of Rock and Roll and then saying,

“You finally went for it with your Southern Belle?”

“Southern Belle? I was talking about Miss Wardwell,” Ambrose says, brow scrunched in amiable drunken confusion.

Hilda snatches the bottle from Zelda’s fingers and pours. She shoots hers before she says,

“Miss Wardwell and I—” she’s spiraling but she’s also thinking as quickly as she can, pulling phrases out of the ether “—exercise. Together. Zumba.” It’s somehow very important to her to keep this thing between her and Mary as much a secret as she can. It’s hers and hers alone, and she’d like to keep it that way. And the exercise part is true enough. “You can drop in to our sessions via astral projection if need be,” she adds toward Ambrose for realism.

Zelda and Ambrose laugh at her. But that’s ok. Derision is better than real knowledge in some cases.

The subject is dropped, and they all continue to talk and laugh and drink. They share and don’t share. Vague adventures and murky details. Titillation fit for family members, slightly more salacious because of the absinthe but still redacted in some ways because of the shared blood. And finally, they’re all ready for bed.

Hilda knows objectively and from experience that she’s tanked and will be hungover in the morning, but as Zelda trips up the stairs and Ambrose passes out on the divan in the front room, she slips away into the office and calls Mary.

“It’s three in the morning,” Mary says.

“Yes. I know,” Hilda says.

“So?” Mary says. “You have something in particular to say?”

“Umm yes maybe,” Hilda says.

There’s a taut silence and then Mary says,

“A problem?”

“Well. Not a problem exactly. But I need you to go to Zumba with me tomorrow afternoon.”

“You know I prefer jazzercising.”

“I know that! But I panicked! And I just said something!”

Another silent pause and then Mary’s voice, more gentle and placating than Hilda’s ever heard it:

“Well stop panicking. Zumba is fine.”

xxx

Hilda’s in a hooded sweatshirt and three-quarter-length spandex leggings sprawled out on the wrestling mat in the far corner pretending to stretch. Really she’s just sitting there with her legs askew.

Her head is pounding and her body is stiff.

Even after she’d vomited up most of the absinthe and red wine, her body had refused to forget what she’d subjected it to the night before.

And also her brain had remembered what she’d promised to Ambrose. What her mouth had said to Miss Wardwell.

She sits and kind of stretches. And Mary approaches, hands her a Gatorade, says,

“You look like shit. I dig it.”

There is no Zumba move that doesn’t hurt. Hilda tries her best to follow the leader, but it’s all so much. Hips and hips and feet and shoulders and hips again.

Finally there’s a five minute break.

And psychopomps. Psychopomps, really?

Her eyes flit and the unnatural birds flit, too.

“I would’ve thought you’d have been better at this by now. Considering how long you’ve been at it,” Ambrose says. It’s the image of him holding a curl bar. And psychopomps on the dumbbell rack.

“You hate going to the gym. Ever since that electric camel incident,” Ambrose’s image says. “But some very rigid and pre-programmed thing? I can see that. Good for you!” More psychopomps, and his face is a little more anxious as he says, “I hope Miss Wardwell does you right. Get swole, Auntie H!”

Ambrose, or the phantasm of him, is gone.

The Zumba class resumes, and Hilda has new strength.

By the end everyone is so sweaty and spent.

Mary sidles up next to Hilda in the locker room afterward. Hilda’s already out of most of her clothes.

“Did I fulfill your needs?” Mary says.

**Author's Note:**

> This could be seen as
> 
> 5 Times Mary Roped Hilda into Things and 1 Time Hilda Roped Mary into a Thing


End file.
